


try harder, next time

by PenelopeJadewing



Series: Kacchako Bittersweet Week 2018 [7]
Category: Naruto, 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Genre: Action, F/M, Gen, Heroes vs. Villains, Pro Hero Uraraka Ochako, fight sequence, it's nice when villains aren't OP, watch her kick pain's butt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 09:56:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16302968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PenelopeJadewing/pseuds/PenelopeJadewing
Summary: Pain is a formidable foe, with a gravity Quirk almost as powerful as Ochako's. She needs to stop him before he actually follows through on his promise to make the sun set on Hero society... but she might need a little help.Day 6 (late): Sunset





	try harder, next time

This Villain calls himself ‘Pain’.

Talk about melodramatic. He stands on the edge of a crane at the top of a skyscraper still under construction, looming over the street below, where a dozen totaled cars billow noxious smoke, chunks of asphalt seem to have uprooted themselves and then crashed back down to uproot yet more asphalt, trees dangle snapped in two, and Ochako can count on one hand the number of windows remaining unbroken in the area. Shards litter the scene like dozens of glittering stars reflecting the deepening sunlight.

Since the battle began forty-five minutes ago, he hasn’t moved from that spot. His comrades in arms, five other members of his gang, once again spread throughout the district, wreaking havoc, causing panic and destruction, damages worth millions, just as they have done relentlessly over the past two months. At every interval, he takes the time to preach forth his cause.

“This society has forgotten pain,” he says, even now, atop his tower, violet eyes half-lidded, dead-looking. “It has forgotten loss. And suffering. In doing so, it willfully ignores the plight of the less-fortunate. The downtrodden, the weak. The strong are raised with unmatched privilege while the rest are left to their own devices, and ultimately, to the misfortune of the fate in which their circumstances deposit them. You Heroes are no Heroes at all. Stain was right to judge you, but even he allowed his personal ideals to blind him to the truth: this entire Hero society must be made to know pain, and only then can true change be ignited.”

Ochako gulps down a stab of indignation. Every time he opens his mouth, she wants to punch him in his triple-studded nose. He speaks like he has every right to proclaim these ‘truths’ and more so to act on them, like he’s allowed to cause so much destruction because his beliefs deem it necessary. Beliefs that he and his entire gang hold, calling themselves Akatsuki—the Dawn. And every syllable bleeds a near-inhuman amount of condescension that would make obvious just how little regard he has for the common man, if his placement far overhead didn’t already do that.

He acts like he’s some kind of deity. A god of judgment.

“Bulls***,” she murmurs as she creeps up along the corner of the building, just out of his sight behind his position and to his right. He’s busy surveying the damage he’s done, watching his operatives battle it out with the Heroes below amidst sacrificial fires razed to tear innocents away from the land of the living.

A merciless god.

He’s gathered quite the posse, though, she knows. Strong Quirks, unusual Quirks, and with all of them watching out for each other, it’s been hard to even take a single one out. One shapes glass into monsters, another transforms his limbs into long-range weapons, one drains energy from your body just by touching you. She doesn’t know the Quirks of the other two; she’s barely glimpsed them since the fight started. And then, there’s this one…

The leader, she’d venture to guess. He’s the one who’s remained distant, an eye in the sky, now and then pressing a hand to his ear, probably communicating intel to his fellows on the ground. And he has some kind of remote manipulation Quirk that allows him to push and pull objects at will.

Ochako’s quite familiar with anti-gravity, and when he pulls something or someone, it looks startlingly similar to when she robs an object of gravity’s comforting hold and lets it fly. Only he adds force behind it, rips his target off the ground and then slams them back down with enough force to split concrete.

But perhaps, if it truly is gravity-related, she has a shot against him. After all, in theory… he can’t manipulate the gravity of something that has none, right?

When she at last crests over the ledge onto the incomplete floor that marks the construction’s halted progress, Ochako squints into the setting sun, which throws beams of searing orange light between the other nearby buildings, sends it glancing off thousands of glass panes and it all seems to be glaring down at her. She averts her eyes toward the crane, on her right, which is only a number of paces away now—the man called Pain stands at a mere twenty meters off.

Success of this mission will depend on the element of surprise.

So she slips in close to his perch, takes a deep breath and then opens her mouth.

“HEY A**HOLE!”

With an announcement like that, he can’t help but take notice. Ochako supposes her boyfriend’s abrasive habits are good for  _something_  on a practical level. Psychological warfare.

His purple eyes dart for her presence before zeroing in on her and narrowing dangerously. She gives him a cute wave, before she presses her fingers against crane’s body and activates her Quirk, setting it to floating. She gives it a shove… right off the edge of the building.

Those purple eyes widen. He starts sprinting up the crane’s neck, trying to reach the body before it gets too far from the edge. Ochako’s waiting for him.

When he raises a hand, she’s ready for it and activates her Quirk as quickly as she can. She starts to float. If he’s still able to pull her despite her lack of gravity… then perhaps his Quirk isn’t related to gravitational force at all.

At first, nothing happens. Then, as he comes to the edge of the crane, which has floated much too far for him to jump to safety, his glare intensifies and she feels a sudden jolt across her body—like weight. Except it’s going the wrong direction… like gravity has not only been switched back on again, despite her activated Quirk, but it’s going  _horizontal_ instead of vertical. Her feet pull away from the ground.

She’s no stranger to flight, but usually, she is the orchestrator and the conductor, directing herself as  _she_  wills. But this is not her Quirk. She has no control here. This brings a whole new sort of nausea to her gut. The air rushes rapidly around her as her speed increases and she’s whipping through the air, straight toward  _him_. Toward Pain.

He keeps his gaze fixated on her. Which means he can’t see the other person who is, no doubt, just waiting for his chance.

Ochako hardens her scowl, deactivates her Quirk on herself, and feels her speed skyrocket with added weight. Now she has momentum. She braces herself mid-flight, ready to come in hot and kicking.

Pain draws a simple blade.

She’s pretty sure she can handle that.

Just before she reaches him, she reapplies her Quirk and rids herself of gravity once more. When he stabs, she kicks out, trying to catch him in the inside of his forearm. He withdraws the hand, her other foot comes up for a landing square in the center of his chest, since she hasn’t stopped moving yet. Is his Quirk still active? Or is it just her momentum dragging her forward now?

Her kick doesn’t connect. He sidesteps and wraps his left arm snug around her calf. His right brings up the knife once more. He wields it like a sword, plunging it toward her ribcage.

It’s easy enough to block with her hand, after which she wraps all five fingers tightly around his wrist. When she lashes out with her free leg this time, both his arms are occupied, and without gravity on his side, he wrenches away not unlike a cannonball leaving the barrel. He takes her right booster with him though, and drops it as he scrambles for a hand-hold along the crane’s neck, something to stop his perpetual motion; the boot begins the long plummet toward the ruined street below.

Ochako huffs and sets herself down atop the crane’s body. The entirety of the vehicle bobs with a terrifying creak at the sudden weight, but she keeps a conscious hold of it in the grip of her Quirk. Her stomach isn’t churning yet.

“Who gave you the right to pronounce judgment on people like this?” she spits, allowing a bit of her anger to seep out in this brief moment of interlude. “None of those people down there did  _anything_  to you!”

Fingers latched around a rung along the top of the metal neck, he levels her nerve with a cold, calculating glare. He seems so… empty. “You are right. They did nothing.”

He lurches forward, pulling himself one wrung toward her. “They did nothing when a few ragged urchins begged them for spare change so they could have a decent meal.”

Again, he moves ahead with great care, climbing the crane like it’s a giant ladder. “They did nothing when they saw mere children sleeping huddled under a single windbreaker in the crook of a bolted garage door.”

He grabbed hold of the next rung. “As long as children suffer needlessly in this world, who are any of you to call yourselves Heroes? I will bring a just end to this kingdom of lies, and in the ashes, raise the dawn of a new and better era of true peace and prosperity.”

“You’re a lunatic,” she shakes her head, regarding him in disbelief. He truly sounds like he believes every word he said, and now she’s close enough to see the unwavering resolve in his face.

“If you cannot see the truth in my philosophy, then you are part of the problem.” He raises one hand, palm out, fingers splayed. Ochako frowns; her Quirk is active, but he’d moved her toward him before. Is it not gravity? Should she release or remain?

This time, when his eyes narrow, she moves  _backward_. Her speed is just as breakneck, and she knows that just behind her, the unfinished building awaits to welcome her with cold concrete. She braces herself for a rough impact.

An explosion flashes light over her shoulders, warms the air at her back, and a pair of muscular arms wrap themselves around her as a force contrary and equal to the one pushing her brings her to a hasty and almost complete stop. They drift listlessly off kilter, moving from the shadow of the crane into the golden light of the distant sunset, but her focused inertia has been traded for simple aimlessness. Slowly, her body unwinds. With all this sudden starting and stopping, _now_  her stomach’s beginning to complain.

She breathes a staying sigh against Katsuki’s chest. He braces a hand against her neck, thumb feathering her jaw. Then suddenly, he’s gone, blasting away from her to arc over her head. She squints at the explosions, cranes her neck to watch him go.

“HEY A**HOLE,” he snarls, cresting amidst the rays of sunlight streaming over the crane, “dontcha know that every sun that rises,” he halts his drift with a small palmful of sparks, and then aims both hands at the criminal several meters beneath him, “has to go down!?”

His toothy grin is positively wicked, just before he lets loose a volley of force on par with what he once used to repel a meteor shower of Ochako’s own making. Raging fire, billowing ash envelopes the crane in a hellish cloud of concussive chaos. Ochako can feel the searing heat from it wash over her in waves, she squints against the shockwave, grimaces at the mournful groan the crane releases in protest.

At the distance he’d chosen, Katsuki can’t have killed Pain. But surely he’s disarmed and disabled him. There’s no way someone would be able to withstand that kind of raw force unscathed. Not even the man who claims to be a god.

When the smoke clears… there he is. Still holding tightly to the crane’s neck as the vehicle descends and rotates idly mid-air, and his dead eyes are trained on Katsuki’s place above him with something akin to disgust. He raises a hand again and, by his previous pattern, he’s preparing to draw Katsuki in to close quarters, knocking him across the crane’s mutilated body, littered with sharp edges of broken metal, in the process. Not even Katsuki’s explosions would protect him from that. And since they have no way of knowing what else Pain has up his sleeve, much less how he was able to withstand that devastating blast…

There’s only one thing left to do.

Ochako knew what was likely to come when she suggested this plan before they left the ground. But still, she hates to think it’s even necessary.

The road is broken already, vacant, waiting. She presses her fingertips together… and releases the crane. And the god.

With another groan of pain, the metal behemoth drops at an alarming rate, straight toward the fires below. For a brief moment, as he falls, Ochako’s almost sure she sees a hint of surprise on Pain’s stony face. Again, those purple eyes dart and find her amidst the rush of smoke around him. He stares…

Is he afraid?

She can’t tell.

Then her body lurches after him. He’s pulling her down  _with him_.

Her mind panics. She can’t release her Quirk, that will do nothing, but leaving it does nothing as well—either way, she has no way to avoid the coming impact she herself orchestrated to end the fight for good. It’ll do just that… perhaps for both of them.

_Katsuki..!_

Something snatches her from the sky.

They careen off to one side, down the block made hazy with smoke, ash, and flying debris, and stagger to a landing just as the crane itself smashes into the street. Katsuki turns his back, shielding her from the sickening calamity of twisting metal and shattering glass, breaking asphalt, that goes on for several seconds until the whole of its weight has met the pavement. The displaced air whips over them, tugging her hair into her face even under her visor.

Gravity is merciless.

Slowly, Katsuki’s arms loosen around her, and they both turn to survey the damage of her final, endgame move. The crane is burning now, a mangled heap of wreckage barely resembling what it once was, a centerpiece to the banquet of destruction surrounding it. The air is thick and spiced with burning, rubber and gasoline. This recklessness will cost more in damages, no doubt, but Ochako is confident it was a necessary measure. This threat could not be dealt with by normal means.

“Hey Ochako,” Katsuki blurts quietly, pointedly. She glances at him questioningly. His eyes—so different from Pain’s, so much more _alive_  and blazing with pure will—meet hers narrowed and filled with red-hot accusation. “You almost let him get you, dumba**.”

She scoffs. “I was trying my best, all right? He’s not exactly an easy one to handle.”

“Try harder, next time.”

“Hopefully,” she huffs, interrupted by a sigh—of exasperation or relief, she isn’t sure, “there  _won’t_  be a next time.”

Carefully, they approach what’s left of the crane, stalking amidst the smoke and keeping their eyes peeled for a body. Unconscious, hopefully, but possibly… otherwise. Ochako swallows the burn of bile. She doesn’t want to think about that yet… prepared as she thought she was. With the sun sinking lower, red light illuminating the surplus of damage, it doesn’t take long to make an unsettling deduction…

Pain is gone. Just… vanished. Katsuki shoots her a fiery look of growing confusion from his place opposite the jagged remains of the crane’s neck, which she returns with a simple shake of her head.

The god has escaped. The sun will set, and there’s no way they’ll be able to launch a search so soon, not with this disaster area to deal with. Tomorrow… the dawn will come again.

Now it’s her turn to scowl.  _D*** these Villains with their deeply philosophical monikers._


End file.
